I just ran my test program again: gs TestSymbol.ps This displays everything correctly. gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=result.pdf -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH TestSymbol.ps The result file does not contain the symbol from the ZapfDingbats font. GhostScript output: GPL Ghostscript 9.52 (2020-03-19) Copyright (C) 2020 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved. This software is supplied under the GNU AGPLv3 and comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file COPYING for details. Loading NimbusSans-Regular font from /usr/share/ghostscript/9.52/Resource/Font/NimbusSans-Regular... 4984572 3471690 1991912 694637 2 done. Loading D050000L font from /usr/share/ghostscript/9.52/Resource/Font/D050000L... 5017340 3570849 2012112 702081 2 done. Loading StandardSymbolsPS font from /usr/share/ghostscript/9.52/Resource/Font/StandardSymbolsPS... 5054500 3638006 2032312 709486 2 done. So nothing has changed.